First, a declaration of interest: in its first sentence, this book challenges the central thesis of this reviewer's Vanishing Diaspora: The Jews of Europe since 1945 (Harvard University Press, 1997). There, I argued that the Jews of Europe after 1945 were launched on a trajectory of demographic decline, social dissolution, and cultural disintegration.

In Recovering a Voice, David Weinberg sets out to correct what he considers the “skewed vision of post-war European Jewry that has marked both scholarly and popular discourse” (21). He focuses on three countries, France, Belgium, and the Netherlands, from 1945 to the early 1960s. “Jews living in those three countries,” he maintains, “never lost their ‘will to live’ as Wasserstein contends” (3). The footnote to this passage cites page 289 of my book, where I wrote: “If the Jews of Europe do, in the end, disappear, it will be because, as a collectivity, they lost the will to live.” Weinberg may be forgiven for stretching matters by omitting the conditional clause. More important is whether the main thrust of the argument of his book carries conviction.

The chief difficulty with Weinberg's framing of the question and of his proposed response is that his book deals only with one part of Europe and only with the early postwar years. In the preface, Weinberg explains that his original project was broader. But teaching and administrative duties intervened and he “gradually and painstakingly honed it down to its present more modest and manageable form.” Of course, there is nothing unusual or necessarily wrong with that. But the new and more limited approach could not, by definition, do more than begin to tackle the big question posed in that first sentence. A work dealing with one particular region containing no more than 10 percent of Europe's Jewish population over a period of fifteen years cannot constitute a rebuttal of an argument concerning the whole continent over a period of half a century.

The book is based on solid research into a wide range of published and unpublished materials in French and Dutch. The quality of production, as one has come to expect from the Littman Library, is admirable. There are some minor errors, such as the claim that Israeli troops “fought alongside” French soldiers in the Suez war of 1956 (176). The French statesman Maurice Schumann is rendered “Shulman” (184). Whatever may be said about the conduct of the wartime “Joodse Raad” in the Netherlands, it is an oversimplification to allege that its members “openly supported the Nazis” (232). Arthur Koestler's Promise and Fulfilment (1949) is not “a novel” (359). Such slips apart, the factual basis is reliable, the tone moderate, and the presentation clear.

The question arises, however, whether the focus is quite right. The greater part of the book is devoted to blow-by-blow accounts of wrangling among Jewish organizations and institutions, most of them short-lived. This is indeed essentially a study of “Jewish communities” rather than of Jews. Yet most Jews in these three countries at that period were not members of Jewish communities. Weinberg knows this: he tells us that in the early 1950s the Consistoire central israélite de France had only 12,000 members (out of a Jewish population of 250,000). In Amsterdam, we learn, membership of Jewish congregations “would reach a post-war high of 5,000, about one third of the Jewish population, in 1947 and would dwindle over the next ten years” (295). But Weinberg fails to draw the necessary conclusions from such statistics, persisting in the notion that organizational hustle and bustle indicate revitalization.

Thus we are treated to dutiful analysis of such eminently forgettable organs as “the Consultative Body of European Advisory Committees which briefly succeeded the Advisory Council for European Jewish Affairs” (91). Many of the “leaders” whose activities are recorded here represented what were little more than letterhead institutions existing primarily as conduits for American Jewish charitable donations or German reparations payments. One observer likened the competitors for such funds to “a basket of crabs” (79). Weinberg quotes another commentator who remarked in 1957 that there were “too many institutions and not enough of a public” (130)—but this highlights the question whether the former merit such inordinate scrutiny.

And then there is another problem that Weinberg again recognizes but does not seem to have fully internalized: the concept of “communities,” as applied to Jews in these three countries after 1945 is a misnomer. A great many French, Belgian, and Dutch Jews in this period shunned the very idea of a Jewish community. Some not only refrained from joining, but shared the contempt expressed by the Marxist Orientalist and controversialist Maxime Rodinson (not mentioned here) for “la peste communautaire” (Le Monde, December 1, 1989). Weinberg notes that “the sharp increase in the number of alienated and unaffiliated Jews was a source of concern to rabbis and religious educators” (18). But he maintains that the “beginnings of the restabilization and reconfiguration of communal life … were already evident by the mid-1950s” (6).

Weinberg, whose earlier work includes an excellent study of the Jews in Paris in the late 1930s, acknowledges that postwar western European Jewry was not only institutionally but psychologically shattered, fractured, and disoriented. But he writes as if the mere recreation of a shell of institutions in the immediate postwar period could repair much of the damage.

What he has failed to take sufficiently into account is the degree of social atomization that, as Hannah Arendt noted, the Nazis were able to impose on their victims—and the extent to which that endured long after the war. Again, Weinberg is much too well informed to be totally unaware of this. He quotes, for example, a Jewish activist in the Netherlands who declared in 1946: “There is no longer a Jewish community there. There are only 25,000 Jewish individuals.… You can no longer speak of a community but of a crowd of people.” But Weinberg has failed to integrate this reality adequately into his analysis.

The relentless chronicling of intracommunal politics has the further consequence that the book accords insufficient attention to contemporary debates on the place of Jews in wider society. Astonishingly, there is no discussion, nor even mention in the bibliography, of Sartre's Réflexions sur la question juive (published in English as Anti-Semite and Jew, 1946), surely the most influential text of the period for both the self-understanding and the external image of French Jews.

Weinberg refers to what he calls, in a cant phrase among Jewish communal activists, “committed Jews.” But like many who use that phrase, his conception of its meaning seems limited to a conventional notion of what such “commitment” might involve: synagogue membership, devotion to the State of Israel, performance of mitzvot, and suchlike. Yet much of the evidence that he himself adduces shows how minimal such “commitment” actually was at that time in the three countries he discusses—as for example evidenced by declining religious observance and minimal Jewish education.

The excessive attention devoted to institutions lends the book a mechanical, almost inhuman flavor. One symptom of this is that significant Jewish public figures of the period, such as Raymond Aron, Vladimir Jankélévitch, Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Richard Marienstras, Wladimir Rabi (Rabinovitch), and Annie Kriegel (to take only the case of France), do not appear. Emmanuel Lévinas is mentioned only in a footnote recording his headship of yet another short-lived institution. In general, too many Jews, whether notables or humble folk, who chose not to participate in the vie communautaire or did so only sporadically or minimally, fall beyond Weinberg's purview. Of course, one cannot mention everyone, but the occlusion of the human dimension mars a book that, with more imagination and greater judgment, could have achieved much more.